O11ycast

O11ycast, spoken on air as Observability Cast, is a technical conversation about how software teams learn what their code is doing once it reaches production. Its stated aim is production systems that are more observable, more reliable and easier to maintain. That could pass for a tooling brief. The recent episodes keep pushing back on that reading. One puts the point flatly: 'This is not a tools problem. This is a systems problem.' The same conversation says the DevOps movement has been trying to build one feedback loop spanning developers and production, and that it has mostly failed. It adds that AI has shortened what counts as a fast feedback loop. The Nubank episode, with Amarilis Campos, calls observability a culture that is easy to undervalue when engineers are busy shipping new services. It also ties reliability to the whole customer journey, down to someone opening an app to send money to a parent or sister. AI comes up in most recent episodes, and the mood about it swings. In 'Software Is the Killer App for AI', with Bryan Cantrill, the falling cost of writing software is compared to what open source did, and a thousand kitchens in every home is described as good news for the fire department. The episode with Dr. Cat Hicks, a self-described psychologist for software teams, takes the other side: developers under heavy load while they adapt to a new technology, with little care for their psychological needs. It also argues that developer experience itself is poorly observed, a fitting complaint on a show named for observation. Then there is the hands-on material. Lada Kesseler walks through augmented coding patterns, including a 'context marker' that shows what an AI agent is holding in context. The same episode pictures an AI turned loose in Zork, a game from the 1980s, and asks what high-level views would reveal what it is up to. The conversation with Maddy Montaquila on .NET Aspire argues for telemetry by default, since stepping through a debugger stops working across fifty interacting microservices, and describes asking Honeycomb's MCP to read the telemetry and name the bug. There is some humor too, from a 'SpaghettiO' moment of panic to a detour into parenthood. Ken Rimple is heard in every recent introduction, Jessica Kerr in most, and Charity Majors, Austin Parker and Martin Thwaites in others. Every recent episode closes by inviting guest and topic suggestions, and Heavybit, an investor in developer-first startups, sponsors the series. The best place to start depends on the question a listener brings: the Cat Hicks episode for how AI tools affect teams, the Kesseler episode for practical habits with coding agents, and the Nubank conversation for reliability measured against credit card and lending transactions. Occasional mild profanity comes up in conversation.